Nairooz Nilafdeen's Blog

WCF REST versioning, JSON and Dynamic objects

2012-01-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

As everyone knows JSON is a very light weight form of transport when it comes to the web, you can respond and consume JSON using WCF REST services, I have blogged about this in one of my earlier posts in 2008, but last month I got to work on this... WCF makes things very easy, if the client sends a JSON formatted string, WCF infrastructure will de-serialize this into a custom type that you have

Being a good Leader

2012-01-22T04:38:00.001-08:00

I was clearing some of the files from the trash when I saw a few notes that I took for a leadership training...here I am writing a few pointers just to remind mt self...- Be confident on what you do.- What are your strengths? make a list, what are the things people have complimented you on- What are your weaknesses? Improve those - Master something, dedicate yourself to learning something new -

LINQ to Object JOIN

2011-10-06T05:22:00.001-07:00

I was reviewing a piece of LINQ to Object Join query of one of my colleagues and a code that is written like this (example, not the exact code, the actual query was complex then this…)... IList result = (from i in col1 join j in col2 on i equals j select i).ToList(); told him to re-write it like this…or using a 2 foreach loop, as the join was too complex. IList<

.Net Reflector to Telerik JustDecompile

2011-05-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

I have been using .Net Reflector for almost 4 years now and this really is a cool tool to just go decompile assemblies when you need to, and this was one of the tool I used to decompile some of the assemblies provided by Microsoft to see what's going in the internals.It was a bit fishy when Reflector was bought by Ants, and gradually as you all might know, Reflector is no longer free, and whats

Entity Framework and POCO - No Support for Xml or Enums

2011-05-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

I have been keeping up to some pace on Entity Framework, however did not try a lot on it.So thought of doing a sample on POCO support with Entity Framework.This was a class I used to insert to my database. public class Task { public long TaskID { get; set; } public XElement TaskParameter{get;set;} public string TaskType { get; set; } public DateTime EnquedTime

WCF Configuration Nightmare, MSBuild, IIS AppCmd

2011-05-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

In this post I am going discuss about some of the deployment nightmare that you might have when you design SOA, where you segregate logic into several decoupled services. the post would not really deal with production deployment , but about internal developer releases.The problem here is that when you have multiple services, and you want to deploy your code in one of the test environments for

Moving Session Data from InProc to State Server or Database And There Problems

2011-04-29T22:52:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since i posted , almost 4 months now, was busy with office work.So in this post I would like to talk about ASP.NET sessions.Ok...now we all know about ASP.Net sessions, we all know there are few methods which you can use to store session information, one common way and default way is store session state in the memory of the machine in which ASP.NET is running, the other way is to

File Transactions (TFX)

2011-01-04T08:34:00.001-08:00

There are situations where a transaction span into a database and to the file system, typically this is handled by running the database call inside a transaction scope and the do the file update call after the database call returns.If the database call fails then nothing is updated into the file system, however if the file update fails then the database transaction is rolled back.The above

WCF 4 - File Less Activation, Default Endpoints and Default Bindings

2010-11-14T08:09:00.001-08:00

Started going through WCF 4 a few months back, however, its today I got a chance to write down something about itSo let me talk about something that was really interesting when I first read about it, File Less Activation of services.In WCF 3.5 when you wanted to host a service in IIS, you had to go through, adding endpoints, bindings and also a SVC file so that IIS can pick the request up.In WCF

Running .NET code on a 64 bit Machine

2010-11-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

Needed some information on how to develop .NET application for 64 bit machine, so I was doing the usual, reading a little bit of it, so before I forgot, i thought of posting it here for future reference.The main advantage of using a 64 bit machine over a 32 bit machine is that memory is not constrained to 4GB; in a 32 bit machine, the highest address that the CPU understands is around 4GB, but

Nullable Value vs Casting.

2010-10-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

Was talking to a team member half an hour ago, and he pointed out that he needs to change a line of code like this code (isLocked is a nullable bool)bool isEnabled = (bool)isLockedtobool isEnabled = isLocked.ValueI asked him why you need to do it that way….and his answer was NO IDEA…So thought of dissembling the IL to see what was really happening. This is the dissembled code I got from Reflector

Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) - Intro

2010-07-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

.Net 4.0 supports parallel LINQ or PLINQ, PLINQ is a parallel implementation of LINQ.PLINQ has the same characteristics has LINQ, in that it executes queries in a differed manner.However, the main difference is that with PLINQ, your data source gets partitioned and each chunk is processed by different worker threads (taking into account the number of processor cores that you have) , making your

Implementing Asynchronous Callbacks with Task Parallel Library

2010-07-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

Bored again...so thought of posting how you can implement callback with Task Parallel Library (TPL).So what am I talking here, basically I start a task in one thread and I want it to call another method once it completes (Asynchronous callbacks ).Here is a sample code.... Task parent = new Task( () => { Console.WriteLine("In parent");

Running Parallel Tasks with The Task Parallel Library

2010-07-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

Down at home with Conjunctivitis, was boring at home, so was listening to some old classics and then thought of writing a post on how you can run tasks with the Task Parallel Library (TPL).Going forward, Microsoft encourages developers to use TPL for concurrent programming. In my previous post I talked about data parallelism , where I showed how blocks of work running inside a loop can be

ConcurrentBag
2010-07-25T21:29:00.000-07:00
.Net 4.0 introduces a new namespace, System.Collections.Concurrent, this namespace contains a set of collections that would be very much useful in threaded programming.The Add or Remove methods of List is not thread safe, meaning that if you are adding or removing items from a list which is accessed from multiple threads, you will end up overwriting some of the items.So, in multi threading

Task Parallel Library - Refresher - Stop an Iteration

2010-07-25T03:01:00.000-07:00

I have been talking about the Task Parallel Library (TPL) 2 years back , when it was in CTP, I was taking a class on High Performance Computing yesterday, and I just remembered that I have forgotten all about this library :).This library has now been officially released with .Net 4.0 and Microsoft recommend you to actually use this library if possible when writing concurrent programs, so that

HashSet vs .Net 4.0 SortedSet

2010-07-17T09:35:00.000-07:00

HashSet has been there for a while, it can store objects in such a way that the time to add an item to the set or remove it or search for an item is O(1), constant time.It uses hash based implementation to achieve this constant time for these operations, however when you want to iterate this collection in a sorted way, the operation is intensive, as the values within the HashSet is not sorted,

ASP.NET Localization - Implicit Resource Assignment

2010-07-10T05:44:00.000-07:00

In one of my previous post I talked about ASP.NET localization basic and 2 ways of which resources can be assigned to ASP.NET pages and controls were also discussed. In this post I will talk about a powerful ASP.net feature that can be used to assign resources implicitly.This feature can be used to assign multiple resources to a control at one shot without individually assigning resources.Lets

Satellite Assemblies and Strong Names

2010-07-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine from another project was talking about how a satellite assembly for a given culture that he created for an ASP.NET server control project did not get picked up for the that culture and the default resource was picked up.I was so curious to why this did not happen, and it was today that it hit me that there project is signed with a strong key and that he did not sign the

ASP.NET Localization

2010-07-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

I have written some blog post on globalization before, but all this was something to do with desktop application or general best practices. This week I was interested in localizing ASP.NET applications (well, I was forced to :)) So, let me start by giving an introduction to ASP.NET resource assignment features. Basically it's the same .NET concept, you create resource files, compile and create

XQuery - Projecting Attributes With a Where Clause a Query

2010-06-21T18:56:00.001-07:00

Had to write an xquery yesterday to extract some attribute values from an xml column, so I thought of posting it here for future reference.This the structure of my XML data stored in the column xmlColumnThis is the records that I have in my tableWhat I need is to select the Id column from a normal table column and then the "value" attributes from the xml coulumn whose "SiteText" is equal to 1This

Validating XML with an XSD using LINQ

2010-06-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

So how do you validate an XML document that you get with a particular XSD?.One way you can do is with LINQ to XML with these steps.1) Create a XmlSchemaSet2) Add the schemas that your document needs to confirm to3) Call the validate method of the XDocumentSo here is the example code. //Load an xml document XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(@"C:\test.xml"); //Define

Exposing Enum Types From WCF

2010-06-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

There are many cases where you would want to expose enum types from a WCF service, so how do you do this?Simply create a data contract and mark the values with the EnumMember attribute and thats it [DataContract] public enum MyEnumName { [EnumMember] CSV, [EnumMember] XML = 2 }

The maximum nametable character count quota (16384) has been exceeded

2010-06-14T18:24:00.000-07:00

Some of our services were growing and the other day it hit the quote, I could not update the service references, nor was I able to run the WCFTest client. An error is diplayed saying "The maximum nametable character count quota (16384) has been exceeded " The problem was with the mex endpoint, where the XML that was sent was too much for the client to handle, this can be fixed by do the following

Configuring mexConnections with net.tcp binding

2010-05-22T02:28:00.000-07:00

This is one of the issues that does not explain it self to me and I could not find any help from MSDN, so I thought of sharing in the blog for future use.I have a WCF library that is hosted in IIS, after some time we wanted to increase the max connection property of the service to 100 from the default value of 10 and also change the listenBackLog value to the same (if you dont know what these

Response.Redirect vs PostBackUrl

2010-05-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

I normally use Response.Redirect to navigate from page to page, someone told me the other day that it would be better to use PostBackUrl of a control to redirect to a page then use Response.Redirect.So, I ran a little test of my own, created a 2 sample pages, where on a button click I do a Response.Redirect like this.protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e){ Response.Redirect("

Passing in parameters into OPENQUERY

2010-05-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

I was struggling for some time now, trying to pass in parameters into OPENQUERY, OPENQUERY does not support passing in parameters, all it does it takes a string value as the 2nd parameter like this,SELECT * FROM OPENQUERY(LINKSERVER_NAME, 'SELECT * FROM COUNTRY WHERE COUNTRYID = 10')What's worse, it does not support passing in a varchar variable as the 2nd parameter.So, if you want to pass in

Generate from using - creating stubs first in VS 2010

2010-04-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

A feature that every one loved in VS 2005 is to just type in you class and press Alt+Shift+F10 and Visual studio shows you the options to add the using statements.VS 2010 this has been extended, to create class stubs for you while you code.For an example, if I want to use a class called Person in my code and if the Person class is not there yet in your code base, all you got to do is type the

Web Protection Library and XSS attacks

2010-04-29T11:18:00.001-07:00

I started using the AntiXSS library that comes with the Microsoft Web Protection Library (WPL), this library gives you several APIs that can be used to protect your application from Cross Site Scripting (XSS).So, What is an XSS attack?, this is where a malicious user injects scripts into the web page the user is viewing and the script runs as part of the response from compromised web site.As a

Linked Servers and OPENQUERY

2010-04-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

So how do you access data from one database to another? (specifically talking about SQL SERVER)One possible way you can do is to create a Linked Server to the database you want to connect to.The easiest way to do this is to go to Management Studio, right click on "Server Objects" and click "New Linked Server"Now on the "New Linked Server" dialog you have 2 ways you can create a Linked Server.1)

Still no Workflow support in Visual Studio 2010

2010-04-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

I was trying out Visual Studio 2010, but was disappointed that they have not included Workflow templates into the express edition (They did not in the 2008 express edition too.)However, you can still create workflows, as it is part of .NET 4.0, but with a lot of pain, that is you have to manually code what ever the designer does for you in the normal editions !.Well, this is where I start hating

Workflows and MS WF

2010-04-23T22:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I completed my training on Windows Workflow foundation.In my opinion, it yet a new tech and provides you with a set of good features.However, a question that was racing my mind all the time was, why the hell do you need workflows, I mean almost all programs that we write have activities and business logic within them, so what the big use of using a framework to model workflows.These

Globalization Best Practices

2009-07-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote an artical on my previous experince on localizing applications.It's hosted at code project...this is the link.

Action Delegate in .Net

2009-05-04T04:41:00.001-07:00

Something that comes with the .Net 2.0 and above is the Action delegate; this delegate can be used when ever a delegate is needed that takes in no argument or just one argument etc…Especially in GUI application it is cumbersome that you need to create delegates here and there even for simple functions, but with this new delegate defined in the System namespace you no longer need to do that,

Running Rhino Mock Under FxCop

2009-04-30T02:44:00.000-07:00

I wanted to try out Rhino Mock, and I downloaded it and tried it out and it was better then NUnit Mock, I was playing around it a little bit and well, ran fxCop on it,And gosh, I found 640 defects.Well, this is not a critic, but it just brings out the fact the amount of static code analysis we do on our code.I for real, run fxCop on the code I develop before checking

Knuth-Moris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm on CodeProject

2009-04-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

Whoo...Its been kind of 3 month since I had my last post, mainly due to assignments, exams and work.These days, its kind of low work and the 2nd semister is yet to start. I was just going through some of the assignments I did for my MSc , and though of posting one on codeproject.You can find my artical here. Its on a string matching algorithm, KMP, one of the fastest I would say. I have made the

Windows 7 Beta Out...

2009-01-09T05:15:00.000-08:00

Windows 7 is the new operating system built on top of Vista, unlike Vista, more emphasis is given to performance, reliability, security and multimedia experiance.One feature that I heard about Windows 7 being cool is it's task bar.You can find more on Windows 7 and also try out the beta here.

The "Dot" Behaviour

2008-12-25T22:10:00.000-08:00

Its just my opinion about dynamic languages, so no need to be harsh.Something that I miss in dynamic languages is IDE support, even if it exists, the "dot" behaviour is likley to be not there.I mean that thing I like about Java and .Net editors is that you can easily make use of it for a quick dirty tool you need to implement, even though you might not no a thing about where to find which APIs,

Back to The Desk

2008-11-29T23:02:00.000-08:00

Well, last 2 weeks went in a jiffy, I was on annual leave for 2 weeks and was hopping to spend some time with my family, but it turned out to be that I had to submit 4 assignments and had spend most of my time reading. I have backlogged so much of lectures that I thought its time for me to catch up, and it was boring some times, just proofs, theorm and out of the world ideas, but I think I am

CLIP for VS 2008

2008-11-18T08:29:00.000-08:00

The Microsoft Captions Language Interface Pack (CLIP) is a simple language translation solution that uses tooltip captions to display translations for English user interface terms for Visual Studio 2008.CLIP can help those users who are not good in English to learn and use Visual Studio 2008 by providing translation for the most common user interface elements of the Visual Studio Integrated

CRS and Me Getting Fatter

2008-11-04T21:55:00.000-08:00

Picked this picture from Shuail's blog. That my first project, CRS...I would say the golden age.I dont see most of them alot, either they are not in the same location or not in the company at all. Well, you can seem me in the corner in a yellows striped shirt, and I was wondering how fat I have become. Me and the workout machine dont go together I guess, every morning I try to get on it and then

No Time For Blog Posting

2008-10-31T07:55:00.000-07:00

This is a post to let u'll guys know what I have been upto these days. It has been past one month since I have posted something.So this is what has been happening, at office..we are targeting on beta and it has been a tough time putting up with defects, so I am sort of going home a bit late these days.I started my MSc in Computer Science at the University of Colombo last month, so there goes my

Going Bad with UI Prototypes

2008-09-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

This whole month went busy at office, it was challenging work, made a number of mistakes and I am happy to say, by the end of the day I learnt out of it.I was tyring to get the module working with little knowledge of what the requirment was, this led me to lot of re-work and most of the time was spent discussing with the team what API should be given and how things should be done. Now I think it

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), IronRuby and Advantages

2008-09-07T01:39:00.000-07:00

What's being popular out there right now is something called IronRuby, which is an implementation of the Ruby language in .Net, which is built indirectly on top of the CLR.So let’s talk a little about how IronRuby fits into the .Net world, something that you should know at this point is that Microsoft is building a common platform for dynamic languages called the Dynamic Language Runtime or DLR

Don't Try To Handle What You Cannot Handle

2008-09-03T02:28:00.000-07:00

One thing that came up last week was that the sorting on one of the paged grid did not work, ok…so we were hunting the bug down, but lucky something popped up in the log file and saved the day.Clicking on the sort headers, makes a service call to retrieve the sorted data, and the UI code was written in such a way that the service call is trapped inside a try-catch block, and if any exception

The Same Old Story Continues and Continues...

2008-08-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

I have put my source to build, hence have some time to write a post…It’s been a while since there was a new post on this blog, reason?..ah work. There is much change that’s going on that does not give me time to write anything new. But this does not stop me from reading and experementing something new, so let me give you an insight on what I have been doing on my weekends.I have been hooked up on

ADO.NET Data Services

2008-07-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

In Traditional web applications, you request a page and the the server, process the request, makes some database calls if needed and put your data and HTML together and pass on to the client.This model has now changed with RIA, using AJAX, Silverlight and others Take for an example a hotel reservation page that uses AJAX for user interactions. Maybe the intital page loads with all available

Making Applications Offline With Microsoft Sync Framework

2008-07-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

Computers are not just on dektops anymore, we see mobile computing theses days. With the heavy use of laptops and smart phone.When data is on the move, there are advantages of taking your data offline, this would typically mean that your client would have a data cache locally.Having data locally has its own advantages, for example, your data is highly available, you can work offline even without

PEX - Automated Exploratory Program Testing

2008-07-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

One of the prodcuts that is being reserched at Microsoft is PEX (program exploration).The team released a 0.5 version product last month and you can download it here.So what is PEX anyway, what does it try to solve?, Remeber how you wrote a method with "amazing" logic and you also wrote nice test cases to test this function, if the function is not very complex and have only a few paths it can

ATOM and WCF Syndication

2008-07-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

Something that got me intrested is, syndication feeds, more particularly on ATOM 1.0.This might not be new news for most of us, but for the sake of a post after a long time, I had to do this !.Most of us might use feed readers, I use Feedreader, and for the people who dont know what this is all about, let me give you an intro.Think of you visiting my blog, every day to see if I have posted

WinForms : DesignMode

2008-06-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

Back to WinForms...It was a user control which calls a service, I knew that if I wrap the service call inside a ComponentModel.DesignMode, I could get away with the service call being called at design time and the designer throwing me exceptions...Now this is not an issue at all when your are designing the control, cos' Visual Studio does not create an instance of the user control that is being

Going Parallel With Parallel Extension For .Net 3.5

2008-06-13T07:43:00.001-07:00

Now a days, almost all computers being used have multiple cores, for an example technologies like dual core.But, although you have dual core, generally you write programs that run on a single core, this does not utilize the total power of the multiple CPU or core that you have.This is exactly the power what Microsoft Parallel Extensions for .NET Framework 3.5 (a.k.a PFX).gives you.With PFX, you

Weekend at Namunukala.

2008-06-11T06:43:00.001-07:00

Last weekend we took some time off, at Bandarawela. Climbing the Namunkala mountain and visiting some natural pools. It was a fun guranteed trip after all. This is our team.

Velocity : Distributed Caching

2008-06-09T00:47:00.000-07:00

Caching is one way you could increase your applications response time. For an example, takea hotel reservation system, where you might need to show a list of hotels for a particularcountry in your reservation page.For each and every reservation made by users, a service call or a direct database call is onvloved to fetch the list of hotels for the country the user has selected, and when the number

Better Late Then Never

2008-06-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks since I have blogged, was a bit hooked up on catching on with some of the MS technologies.I started learning the ADO.Net entity Framework, downloaded some videos, samples and ye, did some pretty intresting stuffs with it.Then there was last week, when one of my friends asked me a question on web services, got a bit confused and I had to dig into some of the ws-* standards

.NET Framework Client Profile

2008-05-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

The .NET framwork keeps on growing and so does the size, so it has become apparent that a lighter version of the .NET Framework is needed.Last week, Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta. This includes the .NET Framework Client Profile,a smaller, optimized verson of the .NET framework needed for clients applications to run.The size of this framework is

WS-* and REST, Which Is Better and Why?

2008-05-12T09:56:00.000-07:00

I have been hooked up to REST these days after having some times to go through the WCF Web Programming Model (I know I am lagging behind in technologies !).While looking at the pros and cons of REST and WS-*, I could see more then few web pages, blogs, on the debate of what’s the best solution for SOA.REST is easy to use, no SOAP-client tool kits needed to generate web service proxies, as the

RESTful Example

2008-05-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

Here is an example on how you would create a RESTful webservice with the WCF Web programming model. I assume that you know how to write a WCF service and host it in IIS.In this example I am going to create a service that will say "Hello" plus a string that is passed into the service, further more the service is going to be hosted in IIS.the following is a WCF service class,[ServiceContract]

RESTful Web Services and the WCF Web Programming Model

2008-05-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

REST (Representational State Transfer) is not a new thing to the web service world; you can find a lot about what it is on the net, but for formality...REST is an architectural style (not a standard) it simply means web services are identified as resources and each operation as a unique URI assigned to it.You invoke the object's operation using the HTTP verbs like GET, POST etc...Most web

Finalization, Know What it Costs

2008-05-02T06:22:00.000-07:00

This is a post about object finalization in .NET.Finalization is not as inexpensive as we think, it increases the pressure put on GC.All objects that need finalization are moved into a finalizable queue and the actual finalization happens in a separate thread. Because the objects full state may be needed, the object itself and all the object it points to are promoted to the next generation (this

Prabath Siriwardena on Open Id

2008-04-25T02:11:00.000-07:00

When I joined in has as a software engineer, one of my first mentors was Prabath Siriwardena. Although it was just 5-6 months in his team, I learnt a lot from him, ranging from writing good code to, team work. He recently acquired his MSc in computer Science from the University of Moratuwa. and today works at WSO2 in the open id integration team. You can listen to his pod cast on Open id here, in

Initializer Running in The Opposite Order as Constructors

2008-04-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

What would be the output of this C# program be?class Program{static void Main(string[] args){new Derived();}}public class Base{A ob = new A("Initialized base A");public Base() { Console.WriteLine("In base constructor");}}public class Derived : Base{A ob = new A("Initialized derived A");public Derived() { Console.WriteLine("In derived constructor");}}public class A{public A(string str) {

Unity Explained

2008-04-18T18:44:00.000-07:00

I had some time in the night to make use of the MS Unity applcation block, and I thought of writting a post on an example written uing Unity.To use the dependency injection in your code via Unity is just 2 steps.1) Create an instance of the Unity container, like this.//Import UnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();UnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();2) Register your type with

Dependency injection and MS Unity Application Block

2008-04-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

Building flexible and maintainable application means to achieve decoupled or very loosely coupled design.Loosely coupled application also mean that you can test them easily using mocks.Two ways of achieving loosely coupled nature in an application is via techniques Dependency injection and service locator.When we talk about dependency injection we are talking about plug-in based development and

Exception Handling Best Practices

2008-04-10T04:15:00.000-07:00

Thought of writing some thing on exception and how it should be handled. These are some of the practices to be followed when managing exceptions in code to give you some more performance. 1) Do not use exceptions to control application logic. Throwing an exception is expensive (building the stack trace, etc are expensive). For an example when searching for a student and when it does not exist, do

Same Old Story...

2008-04-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, here we go again..it's a new project, a new cubical and a code base that I need to start familiarizing...well that adds up to, I don’t get time to blog or at least read something new, ye the same old story..After much consideration I applied for an ADSL line at home, my first thought was not too, as the weekends are allocated for family, friends and long hours of sleep, but then again I could

The Whole New Environment...

2008-04-04T05:49:00.001-07:00

I should have learnt from my lessons! Every time I move into a new project, it seems that everything goes wrong, why?My development environment tends to work counter to my expectation.I have noticed this in almost all the projects I have worked in, the reason being, the tools and other stuff specific to the previous project play almost against the environment needed

IE 8 Beta

2008-04-01T03:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the link where you can download Internet Explorer 8 beta., There are some new features that has been added, you can read more about it here.The only reason I installed IE 7 was due to it's "Tab" feature, but after some use I understood it was not like IE 6 but lot of hangs, crashes and was not much of a stable product. No offence but, it's my opinion.IE 8 beta was released for download, I

Ranking Functions : ROW_NUMBER

2008-03-27T04:40:00.000-07:00

One of the features that was included in SQL Server 2005 were ranking functions and I bumped into one of these last week, The ROW_NUMBER().This function allows you to provide a sequential integer value to the results of your query. This comes in handy when you want to rank your data according to some criteria.Let me throw an example…I have a table that has a set of student marls, I can use a

IIS 7 admin pack

2008-03-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

One of the core features of IIS 7 is that developers can write .Net modules and plug it in and extend the web server’s functionalities. This also meant the MS can release future pack to easily extend IIS features. And last week MS released a technical preview for the IIS 7 admin module; this includes some cool features that web developers can benefit. Some of the new features include:

Wrestle Mania 24

2008-03-24T03:50:00.001-07:00

My favorite sport is wrestling, and really I don’t care if it’s real or not…as long as I enjoy it. Just like the world cup in cricket, in WWE it’s Wrestle Mania, and this time the event is taking place on the 30th of this month.There is going to be some real matches this time and some of the ones that I will not try to miss are:Batista vs UmagaEdge vs The Undertaker for the World Heavy Weight

Tech-talk on LINQ

2008-03-19T07:28:00.001-07:00

I presented a Tech-talk to my fellow Virtusan’s on LINQ last Monday. Around 25 people came in and in no time the place was turned it to a question base. Well, fortunately I was prepared and it was great answering those questions. Some of the areas I covered were on query expression, LINQ to objects and LINQ to SQL. The presentation was planned for 1 hour but it took an additional 20 minutes for

Weekend at Ahungalla

2008-03-14T05:44:00.000-07:00

This weekend the the whole account here at Virtusa are leaving for "Heritance" at Ahungalla to take a day off from the "busy" work life. It seems that there is going to be a quiet a lot of fun planned.However I will not be able to join them, as I got a family function to attend to...ye ..bad luck.Last time we went on our quartely project trip, it was fun though...thought of posting a pic out of

One-to-Many mapping in LINQ

2008-03-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

Thought of posting about how you can map a simple one-many reletionship in LINQ. Lets take for an example the relationship between a country and its cities, which is one to many, one country can have many cities, If I define a class called Country and City and then ofcourse two table called Country and City, I can map the reletionship in a simple way that looks like this [Table] class Country {

Automatic Properties

2008-03-11T07:57:00.001-07:00

I was writing a piece of test code in VS2008 and the prop code snippet want just generate the private field, did some goggling around and found this out.Well, you may remember in the days of VS2003 when you had to write your private fields and then write the property getter and setter for it, that was cumbersome, I remember when it became to hard for me to write all these properties and I had to

Pre-Allocated

2008-03-11T04:18:00.001-07:00

Not much of work these days, the truth is there is no work at all. I already blogged about the project I am currently allocated being closed off at the end of March, however, I am “sort” of pre-allocated to another project again from the same client I was working on earlier Surprisingly, the project is called “Sorcerer”.This one is a bit on the domain and there seems to be new modules coming in

LINQ to SQL

2008-03-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

This is an abstract of LINQ to SQL; this provides a better way to linq your entites class to the database tables. For example lets say you have a table called “tbl_customer” with fields “customer_name” and “customer_id”, you would map your entity class “Customer” as follows [Table(Name=”tbl_customer”)]public class Customer{ [Column(Name=”customer_id”)]

Project closure...End of March

2008-02-28T02:18:00.001-08:00

It’s another month to go !. Ye, I am talking about my project; I was working on the security, task scheduling and logging component of an ETL application. It’s been 1+ years since I started on this project, it’s based on a J2ee backend, and .Net 1.1 front end.At first I did not like the project as it was being developed in .Net 1.1, but as it went on I learnt many

ASP.NET MVC Framework

2008-02-25T06:17:00.001-08:00

ASP.NET MVC Framework is another extension that has been added to .net 3.5, this framework allows developers to create ASP.NET projects using the MVC pattern (of course as the name suggests!).I took a look at it and it seems pretty easy to use. You can learn more about it here.Just to give an idea about how easy controllers can be implemented, take a look at the code below...public class

Extension methods and Lambda expressions

2008-02-22T04:09:00.000-08:00

Maybe it’s a bit late for me to post about .Net 3.5 + VS 2008, but that’s what I am exactly doing these days.My first interest in the language was on Lambda expressions and extension methods and then LINQ.I have learnt quite some stuff about LINQ, meaning the basic, but still did not have a time to try out LINQ to SQL, maybe I will, in the coming week.Just to give you an idea about Lambda

LINQ

2008-02-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

LINQ, Language Integrated Query is a new feature in .Net 3.5. Tradiationally, a programmerneeds to different query language to query different datasources, for example, data sources likeSql databases, XML and in-memory objects. This meant the programmer needed to learndifferent query languages for each and every technology. There was another problem as well, queries werewritten in string form and

Being part of an interview

2008-02-14T03:45:00.001-08:00

I always wanted to be part of an interview, and today I got the chance. I was given a chance to accompany one of the interviewers at Virtusa. I got a chance to throw some question as well, not very hard once but you know…basically I did not have much questions. Anyway, kind of liking this, maybe I should do this often.

Memory leaks in managed code

2008-02-13T06:33:00.001-08:00

This was something we ran into in our application used custom GUI components, and well those were rough days… You sometimes hear that a managed language like C# or Java does away with memory leaks, and frees the programmer from having to think about freeing objects from memory. Well this is not especially true for GUI code. The main reason for this is the use of the Observer pattern. While

SharePoint training

2008-02-12T04:15:00.001-08:00

I was having my usual time at home today when I remembered “my god I have a training to catch”… I had to race into office and finally made it at around 10 AM. The training was on Microsoft SharePoint server, the trainer was Joy Pradeep one of the MVP of Sri Lanka. The training was good but the first few hours were mostly concentrated on the administration side of SharePoint, I did not get a

ILMerge

2008-02-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

Cool tool for .Net, ILMerge. This allows you to merge two assemblies into one target assembly. One most obvious use for this would be when you have two project one written in C# and one in VB.Net, using ILMerge you can combine these assemblies to distribute to your customer as if you have developed it in one project !!!.span>

Debugging WCF services hosted in IIS 6.0

2008-02-08T05:55:00.000-08:00

I have been doing some sample projects in WCF (hosted in IIS 6.0), and today I was trying to debug the service like I have done with web services and ASP.net but with no luck, the break point does not get hit at all !!!, After some goggling found out that direct debugging of projects in the same solution is not possible with WCF.The work around is to run your client

Back for good!!!

2008-02-08T05:48:00.001-08:00

Ok guys I am back in the mood to blog, I do remember I said this before but this time it’s for the best...I have been having a hard time at work and did not fins sufficient time to send a post.I have made up mind to take some time of my work to post a message or two at least every week !!!

Life goes on

2007-06-19T04:38:00.001-07:00

It’s been quite some times that I have started to blog, not that I was not interested…it was just that I did not have time.My work place recently has started to become busy. And guess what I have started to come to work early. The weekends, ye they come and go, seems that Saturdays and Sundays go too slow compared to working days.Three to four months before , I was hooked up to the computer and

Sri Lanka , where is it heading?

2007-05-10T07:44:00.001-07:00

So it seems that months pass by with no peace, there were several bombing the past month. And still living in fear…Ha.. some said, Sri Lanka is going to change, but it’s obvious that it’s degrading worse very day, not to mention that he has done a few (may be a lot for others) good things to improve the stability of the country.But this does not prove any overall improvement in the society, and I

I love when it rains....

2007-05-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

It’s raining more then cats and dogs in Colombo these few days, and it became even worse yesterday.It took me nearly 4 hours to go home instead of the routine 1 hour, and that was hell of a traffic in Colombo.Sort of enjoying work these days, it’s raining , the air conditioner chills more then ever, come to office around 11 am and leave at minimum 6.Coming to office is also a bit of a war, by

We are into the finals !

2007-04-24T23:47:00.000-07:00

I am a cricket fan, (well that’s the only sport I know to play!) .I remember how I enjoyed watching the last World cup, although our guys you know…But this time, it seems that I have lost a certain amount of interest, of course after the busy day and also the busy day ahead does not let me watch the matched until late night.I am damn happy that our guys got into the finals, after all it’s my

Wrestle Mania 23

2007-03-29T03:41:00.000-07:00

Finally, Wrestle mania 23 is here…Yep folks, it’s on April 1st. These are some of the events I would not want to miss watching..Undertaker vs Batista - for the World heavy weight championship.John cena vs Shawn Michel - for the WWE championship.Battle of the billionaires – Umaga vs Bobby lashlyFor more information visit wwe.com

A Crouching tiger waits for it’s prey

2007-03-29T02:34:00.000-07:00

A Crouching tiger waits for it’s prey…Sometimes you will not respond immediately to your foe, but rather wait until the correct time.This does not mean that this person is not smart enough to defend him self, but what it really means is…, planning the attack takes time.

Hack of a week

2007-03-29T02:07:00.000-07:00

This week has been frustrating for me. First I did not have sufficent work at office, and I had to stare at the monitor for half of the time I was there at work.Then the hard disk of my computer at home got corrupted, so I had to buy a new computer (anyway I was planning to buy one cos' the one I had was a bit old. All that money!!). Thirdly, I got soar throath and a fever, and the drugs that I

Localization tips..

2007-03-20T05:22:00.001-07:00

These are something that you would need to consider when planning to localize your system. Externalize all the hard code strings, that is, move it into a separate resource file. Do not move your strings into the forms own resource file (talking about .NET Win forms), this is because every time you add a new language support or even if you change something on the

Method inlining

2007-03-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Executing a method has a cost, this cost can be partially avoided by method inlining.Method inlining means basically moving the method into the callers body for an eg. Take a look at the codeint Calc(){return x * y;}int num = Calc();when Calc() is inlined what it basically means isint num = x * y;Unlike C++ (as I read) C# does not have inline keyword to explicitly inline methods, this is due to

InitilizeComponent() visited

2007-02-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

Well these are two scenarios that happened to me:In one of the earlier projects, just before a release I was working on a alignment issue in an aspx page and no change to the code behind file was done. But when the setup was tested on a fresh machine, the application threw exceptions !!. Finally what we found out was that the code behind of the file has really changed, to make things worse, the

More on localization...

2007-02-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

I was changing the Region and language settings in the control panel, and was expecting that text in the forms to show up in the language that I had set, with no luck.Did some reading and ……CurrentUICulture is a per thread settings that governs from which resource file the ResourceManager class uses in a localized application. CurrentUICulture is a language setting and does not have any thing to

Arguing with a egg head !

2007-02-22T03:49:00.001-08:00

Well, after posting a mail on Stringbuilder vs String to a group in Sri Lanoka (BITPROJECTS), A guy named Ranga, started pointing out a mistake in my example, well I proved that he was wrong !!.But I guess the guy did not wanted to give up, so he started talking about everything else other then StringBuilderThink he might have got really frustrated, loosing !!!.So finally I thought of giving up,

String vs StringBuilder

2007-02-19T22:24:00.001-08:00

Take a look at the code given below string str = string.empty; for(int i= 0 ; I < 100; i++){str += i.ToString();}You should never use string concatenation inside a loop, the reason for this being that strings in java and c# are Immutable.What this mean is that each time you concatenate a string, a whole new string object is created with the older value appended to the